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The Ledgers of Baldr: 4E473
Actions: Ashelani: Queen Torol chitters excitedly at the utter destruction of Stavengar. The dwarven-Mu'lakkan Coalition forces had fallen in battle to the Derultians and the forces of PADO, and now the capital lay under the control of Central. It was the finest sunrise in years. For Queen Scholus and her daughters, the victory was bittersweet: they had become great friends of many dwarves, some of whom had even opposed the suprise attack. But the failure of Len-Eir had bound her claws. It would be a dark day for Stavengar. Yet the attention of the Hive is drawn elsewhere. From Derult, Len-Legas sends word that Central itself is under attack. Realizing that it was only through Derultian strength that the battle for Stavengar was won, Queen Torol orders the continued production of military forces. Two new Nautilisk navies are raised, hopefully with the new resin armor should Queen Scholus complete them in time. Similarly, the Queen Torol recognizes that the war effort will require more troops, and calls upon her sister to hatch more carcinoborn and bombhoppers to supplement her own Ashelani and flammenwurmer production. Den-El'maut will lead these new armies. (raise navy x2 (-60 wealth), raise army x1) Realizing that Mu'lakkan naval forces are still a formidable threat to the nautilisks, Queen Scholus continues her work on the resin upgrade, so that they may avoid combat with the skyships. She switches from pure Ashelani resin to a carcinoborn mixture that is more concentrated and, hopefully, much stronger. (Avoid navy tech go!, -60 wealth) Legaros: Upon word reaching New Haven of the unprovoked sneak attack upon the peaceful Legarosan Expeditionary Fleets, a furious Tha'r'olk calls once more for volunteers to crew the newly built vessels moored off the cities starboard. This brutal attack will not be forgotten. (Raise Navy 1+2) Meanwhile, the civilians aboard the aqua-tropolis attempt once more to settle the forests of Ardunne. Well, to be more accurate, twice more. (Expansion 3+4) Mu'lakka: Recruiters scramble across the Manuk colonies collecting any and every able body to join the navy to fight off the robot scourge. (Raise navy, 1-4) Kaz'ur: In the aftermath of the defeat of Stavengar’s armies, Jasura presents a series of requests before the council. Two more armies of paladins, and for the first time in the history of Kaz'ur... a navy? Previously, the nation of golems had done most all that they could to avoid acknowledging the existence of the sea. Despite their races lack of seafaring experience, Jasura proposes that recruits be drawn from refugees who have fled Legaros, and are more familiar with the sea than the Ashik. (2 Armies, 1 Navy) Thaamira and the Nameless One continue their experiments with the sword of the father, though the Nameless One is beginning to question how much progress is actually being made. Stavengar: The dwarves of Stavengar, most of whom are tired of getting picked off by Derultian forces before they can become properly organized, spread out into multiple guerrilla sects that spread out across the nation. Pamphlets begin to circulate, decrying the invaders autocratic beliefs, and promoting the democratic ideals that Stavengar holds so dear (Culturex1). Work continues on the great temple in the city of Stavengar, which had been abandoned during the Age of Immortality, in an effort to unite the dwarves (culturex1). An etching of the battle of Lespodi and the Eremia campaign is added to the great gates of Stavengar, stirring national pride and reminding dwarves that they can actually win battles (culturex1). Finally, music fills the pubs and taverns of Stavengar as people everywhere sing rousing renditions of "Stavengar", the music for which I have already posted. (culturex1). Think I had 90ish wealth left, so we'll add +3 to the temple roll. The Hall of the Five: Upon reading the battle report from the troops, Kellus walks into his office and sweeps everything off of his desk. He then locks the door and sits down in his chair. He kicks his feet up on his desk and pulls a bag of marshgrass out of his robes. He throws the bag on the ground and fumes emanate from it, engulfing him. He's earned it. It's been a hard two centuries, but in its span he's watch the fall of five nations, two of which were his own doing. (1: Nothing) Garma lets Kellus have his year off, but she's not going to take one until she has Derult's main computer on display in her quarters. She enlists Gojac and continues raising armies to prepare for the worst. (2 & 3: Armies) Rucahn was asked to help raise armies, but he was immovable. For a while, he just sobbed in his meditation spot. After a while, however, he cheered up. By the end of the year, he had begun writing an epic to recount the battle for Derult. (4: Culture) Derult: The General doesn't feel anger. It isn't something he is capable of. But he is only as patient as a situation demands. Flying west is not as easy as east, forcing The Ascender to map a course mere feet above the waves to minimize the effects of the prevailing winds. Every wingbeat from his winged mount pounds striated ripples into the ocean surface, causing his glittering reflection to tear and reform with every passing second. Sensing the urgency of its rider, his raptor pushes ahead with a dogged intensity, but behind him some of the ground-attack units are flagging. Noticing a slight change in the cadence of his guide, GE001 looks to his left and sees The Ascender reigning in his raptor. Catching his superior's gaze, the rusted Derultian begins, "We need to let up the pace! Some of the soldiers are almost out of sight, and once night falls they won't-" "Leave them. If a few laggards can't maintain adequate airspeed, perhaps it will motivate a few of the others to stay in formation. We push on. This is no time for sentiment." Tech x3 x1 Gold Spent Results: The Ashelani Dominion: 9, 1, 15, 21 *What do you mean?* Len-Scholus asks silently, the echoes of her thought waves traveling hundreds of miles eastward toward the coastline. *It’s gone completely insane, my queen.* But Queen Scholus doesn’t need the drone to tell her that. She’s already there, looking through his eyes at the scene below. In a dank underwater cave far below a rocky beachhead, a writhing and shiny tentacled mass froths in the deep. A long and sinuous suckered limb smashes through the glassy front coating of an adjacent breeding pod, sending a huge, misshapen pile of inky entrails and malformed bone slithering into the brine. Queen Scholus turns her surrogate head calmly. Off on a rocky side path high above the beast, a gaggle of dwarfen slaves, all chained together by their legs, stab downward feebly at the raging krakenoid with thirty-foot metal poles. A tentacle sweeps from their perch, and they all topple to their deaths, trying futilely to grab at handholds along the side of the wall. *They’re all like this?* she asks. *Every hatchling, as far as we know.* Abominable. Queen Scholus had just finished a meeting with the Derultian ambassador, and had left assurances that Ashelani naval support would be rolling out over the next two days. She hated changing timetables. *Mollify it by feeding it the slave-foods. If that doesn’t work, purge the breeding chambers and start anew.* (Rolls to raise navies next turn succeed on a 17 or higher). (2 army raised, -10 income) (tech success—your navies may now freely evade enemy navies as long as they are moving. This bonus does not apply if your navies are standing still). Legarosan Grand Fleet: 8, 20, 17, 3 Trying to get an ox cart from one side of New Haven to the other was a herculean labor in and of itself, but Ignati timber peddler Chan’tyk has set about this task in the early morning light, taking his three sons along with him to help in the process. The great raft city has docked in a natural cove, and great wooden bridges stretch out of its four main gates in several directions, offering access to the newly settled land (-10 wealth, +6 income). Chan’tyk and his sons spend two hours maneuvering the cart through the highly congested streets of the great city raft, which shift constantly underfoot with each step. City blocks and conjoined housing segments jostle against one another and push entire streets out of alignment, and at one point the Ignati and his sons, as well as a huge crowd, are left waiting at the end of a roadway for an inconveniently placed storefront to slowly and laboriously shift out of their way. New Haven was no place for the impatient, and, well, if you were an Ignati, you were always impatient. The months and months at sea, living off of rationed fish… Chan’tyk never wanted his family to have to go back to that. That was why he and so many others were choosing to settle on land, and let the floating city of New Haven continue on its way, off to participate in the war. In Thar’olk’s latest speech in the town square a month ago, he had mentioned that a new navy was being commissioned, and not an hour later, Chan’tyk had flown to the Bureaucratic Services Office and traded his assigned plot of land in for a smaller one with many more trees on it, just in time to make huge profit in the timber industry. Hopefully, he thinks, if he saves up enough, his family will be able to live comfortably on the shore when the Great City leaves once again for parts unknown. (-10 income, +1 navy) The Mu’lakka Lands: 15, 19, 22, 14, 6, 12 El’baat had been trying to work the topic of the war into his lessons to the children—it was important for them to learn about the raids further up the horn of Manuk, and why exactly the Derultian Coalition was such a grave threat. “You see,” he begins, “it’s important that we win not only for our sake, but for the sake of our dwarfen allies in Stavengar.” He gestures to the map in the front of the tiny classroom, pointing at the location of the besieged dwarfen nation with a thin reed. In the back of the class, Lu’lit asks a question without raising her hand. “But why are we even friends with Stavengar at all? Dwarfs are all grumpy.” “Lu’lit, the dwarfs are currently fighting for their very lives, and regardless of how… grumpy they—“ “My mom says that the dwarfs started the war,” a boy in the back says. “Maybe, Yuwae, if your mother examined the underlying social factors behind—“ “’Social factors,’ nothing. My mother says that the dwarfs marched across the big… the big hole… and that they tried to sneak their army across.” “Th-that’s beside the point,” El’baat says, his brow furrowing with consternation. He silently tries to compose himself, and finds that he’s gotten back into the groove again. “Besides,” he says to the children, smiling and pointing to the Ashelani drone sketched on the blackboard, “see how scary and mean-looking those bugs are?” The children all murmur and nod their heads in tacit agreement. Those bugs certainly looked scary and mean. (5 navies raised, -50 income) Kaz’ur: 5, 9, 13, 10 Jasura grows more and more disillusioned with her role in the Council day by day. It seems as though hard times have fallen on Kaz’ur over recent years. Even their military victory at the Eir-I had come at the edge of a sword—figures from the battle reported more Ashik loss of life than at any other engagement in history, save for the disastrous battle on Liosa that had resulted in the death of her mentor, Abdid ibn-al Walid. After the paladins of the First Crusade has mostly all perished, few had come forth to answer the second call to arms. And of course, the dwarfs, especially in Al-Kerouine, were still a vocal minority who spoke out not so much against the government of Kaz’ur, but the menace of the Ashelani. The navy has been raised, your stout capital ships adorned with stone minarets and great triangular sails of many colors, in the style of your people. Most boats use rowing as the primary means of locomotion, though, seeing as an Ashik crew can row for days without ever needing rest. (-10 income, +1 navy) Jasura doesn’t see how useful this navy will be in the months of campaigning ahead, with no armies to board it. Stavengar: 17, 11, 19, 5 The great cultural rallying of Stavengar is not going as momentously proponents of the state had hoped—dwarfs, it seems, have mostly tired of the war. Whereas the casualties of the first war were at least split between Stavengar and her foes relatively even-handedly, in this world conflict, there has been almost no contest in terms of land egangement—the forces allied with the Ashelani were clearly of superior training and number from the very beginning. The idea of the dwarfen “vengeance war” that was envisioned at the outset has been thrown out the window. The engineering projects manage to capture the public attention, but by this point there are invading armies pouring into Stavengar from the north, and it is only a matter of time before the besieged city of Ilium runs out of food and yields to the Ashik caliph whose warriors surround the city. (+6 culture from engineering projects, -90 wealth) As for the song, people like the tune, but there are complaints in some bars every time people start singing it, complaints that the lyrics don’t match the meter and that the subject matter is the teensiest bit forced. In dwarf culture, everyone’s a critic. The Halls of the Five: 15, 16, 16, 7 Gojac has been curiously absent from meetings over the past month—not that Garma particularly minded, honestly, it was easier to get most things done when he wasn’t around. It was kind of funny, really, that the immortal emperor Gojac of Ahazhuara—whom she had spent her youngest years idolizing—he was almost an entirely different person. No sign of Kellus today, either. Or the Destroyer, for that matter. Sometimes she got the feeling that they were all off somewhere doing things without her. It’s not like she really wanted to be included, anyway, she would just like to have been asked, that’s all. (-20 income, +2 armies) Further north, Rucahn puts pen to paper, opening his mind’s eye and letting unfettered Truth pour through. His mind is clouded—the amount of information in the universe has increased exponentially since he last checked three hours ago. Instantly, Rucahn knows that Gojac and his new blasted creation are behind all of this. Teleporting himself to the Creator’s interior chambers, Rucahn was shocked (well, not shocked—nothing ever shocked Rucahn) to see Gojac and Abbadon, who were normally at odds, giggling and huddling over something on the floor in the corner of the room like schoolboys. “Ah, Rucahn, come take a look at this.” “You’ve created a miniature world—an alternate history of Ahazhuara—inside a big bowl,” the Inquirer says, trying very hard to relay how peeved he is at this new development. Gojac frowns. “Just go ahead and ruin the surprise, why don’t you?” Rucahn shoves past the older man to get a peep inside the glass bowl, the inside of which is covered in tiny rivers and mountains and forests that slope upward towards the rim. Floating above the whole thing is a tiny, miniature sun. Abbadon is busy slowly and erratically twirling a small clay ball on a length of twine above the bowl, cackling. “Abaddon,” Gojac asks, “what are you doing?” “I’m messing around with their moon. Their astronomers must be freaking the hell out.” It was true—in his mind, Rucahn can clearly see an old and learned man in robes leaping to his death from a white marble spire—his life’s work—a theorem to calculate the movements of the moon, having been proven worthless, making him the laughingstock of the academic world. “You realize, don’t you, that my mind is now filled with conflicting images from three different planets?” “You should join,” Abbadon says, ignoring the complaint completely. “Gojac’s already got me to sign on—he’s gonna be God and I’m gonna be Death. We need somebody to play Fate to make things more interesting.” “I’m afraid my own projects wouldn’t allow me time to participate,” Rucahn says coldly. “Besides, a world inside a bowl is just stupid.” As Rucahn teleports away, he knows deep down, in his heart of hearts, that he will inevitably be back to play Fate despite his time constraints, simply because a tiny world inside a bowl was actually a really, really cool idea. Derult: 20, 16, 24, 7 GE001 stares transfixed at the two clocks on the ground, each one placed opposite the other so that an observer could easily look at both. Atomic clocks—their time rates in theory kept in balance by the constant rate of degradation of the radioactive isotopes housed inside of them. And yet, the single clock on this single, isolated patch of snowy ground in the middle of the Manukan desert is running much faster than its counterpart, which sits on the hot and dry ground behind the General’s hunched figure. As he watches, for the fifth time in the past six hours, the patch of snowy ground falls into night—a sort of tube of blackness stretching up into the bright daytime sky. The logical conclusion: time was being manipulated and accelerated by enemy agents, likely the Five, to cause mass confusion and inconvenience on the Derultian side. To a human, this would have been a lot to process, but Derultians were logical and methodical to an unreasonable degree. GE001 looks up into the pillar of blackness—the night sky of some future date far away from now, and angles his head to get a better view of the Red Planet, which looms much larger in the sky in the future than it does in the present day. But GE001 could worry about the impact of the planet much later, after he had seen the war to its conclusion. He couldn’t get to close to the time anomaly—if he did, radio waves of years and years worth of messages, messages that hadn’t even been sent yet, crackled in his ears and forced him to take a step back to clear his head. A plan was already forming in his head. Technology could not replicate what the Five had wrought here with magic, that he knew. But, at some point in the future… The Ahazhuarans had unknowingly given Derult a blessing in disguise as a curse—within these isolated time phenomena potentially lay decades of technological development that could be achieved in the span of a few months. It would be a gambit—there was no way to telling if objects could leave the time bubble once they entered. But, if there was no current way… With years upon years of research—accelerating time even further inside the anomaly might certainly be possible. From there, they could possibly work out a plan to leave the anomaly and return to their current time, bringing with them future armaments and weapons. GE001 was needed on the ground to command the troops, but there were units in his battalion that he could spare for the sake of enlightened experiment. Wordlessly, the next morning, twenty-two Derultian soldiers are sent into the raging white blizzard that stretches high into the sky for miles and miles. They are swallowed up in an instant, their figures disappear immediately into the white blanket of pouring snow. GE001 leads the rest of his men onward to their objective, not wanting to dilly-dally for much longer. (wait until this military phase for the results of the time experiment) The southern desert of Manuk: a ceaseless raging blizzard, untouched by the daylight--a column of black and grey and white swirling up into the sky as far as the eye could see. Mu'lakkan mercantile pilots averted their gaze when passing the time anomaly--the whole thing was an unnatural plague of bad luck. A glowing, pulsating green light could be seen inside the timeslip, although what it signified, no one could say. Many explorers over the past few months had followed the light and attempted to brave the storm, but none of these men had ever returned. It had been two weeks since LE202 and his Derultian exploratory unit had set foot inside the timeslip, but to them, it had been around four and a half years. They had been busy. The Phase Engine is a monolithic steel structure, its surface completely covered in a layer of ice. From miles off, it seemed to glow faintly--the sheer amount of energy it produced was astounding. But not just conventional energy--the Derultian Phase Engine manipulated what the Derultians called "locational energy," which the Ahazhuarans would have termed "Console energy." The Derultians now had a direct conduit to the makeup of the universe--the ability that Ahazhuarans had treasured for thousands of years. Sure, no Derultian could "cast" magic, but with the advent of the Engine, certain Console commands could be implemented that overwrote the natural laws of physics. LE202, his face caked in years of frost, plugs himself into the Phase Engine and begins experimenting with the fundamental nature of object permanence. Derultians now have the ability to phase into and out of the material plane at will. (+6 military) Battles: A number of battles were fought in the year 4E473, including The 2nd Battle for the Derultian Seas The Fall of Stavengar The Fall of Ilion The Fall of Central The Siege of Mu'Manuk Economic Changes Following the Battles: 1. All of Stavengar’s income (47 wealth per turn) has been divided among the three nations. (Kaz’ur: +20 income, Ashelani: +15 income, Derult: + 12 income) 2. Derult loses ¾ of its wealth due to the loss of its physical assets. 3. Derult loses all its income from its territories on Manuk, and The Five gain control of this income (43 wealth per turn). Category:The Ledgers of Baldr